HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Translocal Programmers

Translocal Channel (Frequency Clock), February 8, 2003
http://channel.walkerart.org

Translocal Programmers

Danger Museum
lives and works in Singapore/Norway
Fran Ilich  b.1975  (Mexico)
lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin
Fatima Lasay  (Philippines)
lives and works in Philippines
Re:combo
lives and works in formed 2001, Recife, Brazil
Sarai Media Lab  (India)
lives and works in India
The Thing
lives and works in United States
Trinity Session
lives and works in South Africa
Walker Art Center
lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Launch the Translocal Channel

"DIY [Do It Yourself] communities and self-organizations are the main source of sustainability, the main force in the revival and continued development of today's post-planning cities. The creation and development of alternative art spaces is a perfect example. Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone shifts constantly between the existing center and the periphery creating a kind of 'emptiness' that subverts the established order.--Hou Hanru, "Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State"

As part of the "zone" of the Temporary Autonomous Sarai of Raqs Media Collective and Atelier Bow-Wow, and in recognition of the dynamic importance of DIY communities, Translocations has asked a number of artist organizations around the world to program the Translocal Channel.

The Translocal Channel is a kind of incunabular global C-Span for the arts based on a streaming media player and scheduling software called Frequency Clock, itself developed by the artist group r a d i o q u a l i a (Adam Hyde and Honor Harger). Basically, Frequency Clock allows for distributed programming of multiple channels of streaming media content viewable over the Internet. As such it knits together geographically separated programmers, a loose network of hosting nodes, and a global audience with new media content that does not need to meet the homogenizing mcglobal standards of commercially driven, broadcast media. It is truly a set of translocal flows.

The Translocal Channel becomes a platform within the Temporary Autonomous Sarai--and on the Internet--for programmers around the world to insert their own point of view into the exhibition, from the periphery to the (Walker Art) center, so to speak. Content ranges from a bi-weekly two-hour live mix of sounds by Brazil-based Re:combo to a weekly series of programs by Trinity Session in South Africa to artist work from southeast Asia programmed by the Danger Museum to a lecture series on "New Ideas on Globalization," featuring such notable speakers as Tariq Ali, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Carol Becker.

Danger Museum
The Danger Museum is a nomadic organization whose codirectors are the artists Miho Shimizu, Øyvind Renberg, and Woon Tien Wei, working respectively from Japan, Norway, and Singapore. The Danger Museum adapts to each location that it visits and questions the basic functions of the art institution, hoping to fill the gaps that the art museum leaves behind. The Danger Museum's working practice is dedicated to bringing together projects from different cultural, geographical and social contexts. By creating a meeting point for artists, the Danger Museum aims to promote practices that are not widely documented. Danger Museum was established in 1998 and has previously been seen at Contemplation Room, Overgaden Gallery, Copenhagen (2002), The Show, Insa Art Centre, Seoul (2002) and Soft, International Institute of Visual Arts, London (2002).

Fran Ilich
http://delete.tv
Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Fran Ilich is a filmmaker, novelist, screenwriter, new media artist, border activist, and organizer. Ilich serves as the general director of Cinemátik, the first cyber-culture festival in Latin America, as well as the editor at large of Sputnik Digital Culture, an online daily news service and monthly print magazine. He also moderates nettime-latino; edits the Mexico City edition of Rhizome; and is the author of the best-selling novel metro-pop. His screenplay of Interacción was broadcast on the Discovery Channel in Spanish and Portuguese and took second place at the 1st International Awards of Hispanamerican screenplay by the New York Film Academy & USA Network in 1997. His film Una Ciudad Sin Estilo was screened at the next SUPPOSED TO BE SMASHED TOGETHER? 5minutes III International Conference in Amsterdam in 1999 and is now part of the database of the Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Ilich's current project Modem Drama is a digital film collaboration with Ciberfeminista.org, a group of young Mexican feminists working with the Internet. His latest film will be shown at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Fatima Lasay
Fatima Lasay is an artist, writer, researcher, and assistant professor of new media art at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. She obtained her BFA in Industrial Design and MFA at the University of the Philippines.

Lasay's new-media projects include Manipulation (2000, Galeri Situ, Manila), Geocentricity and Gimokud the Melting Soul (2001, online), Healing Cultures through Digital Art (2002, online), and the Digital Media Festival 2000-2002 (Corredor Gallery,Manila).

Lasay may be contacted by e-mail (fats@up.edu.ph) or through the College of Fine Arts, Bartlett Hall, E. Jacinto Str., University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Philippines. Her Web site is at .

Re:combo
Re:combo is a Brazil-based but now worldwide collective of "musicians, software engineers, DJs, professors, journalists, and computer geeks," who combine live events, peer-to-peer networking, and music resampling as their medium.

The Thing
Since its inception in 1991, THE THING has provided a flexible and supportive venue for developing, supporting, and presenting innovative media art and cultural criticism concerned with exploring the possibilities of digital aesthetics.

Initially, in 1991, THE THING took the form of a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) that facilitated discussion and experimentation, primarily within New York City arts communities. In 1993, when UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX copy protocol) technologies permitted broader communications throughout a small and scattered but vibrant community of like-minded people, THE THING took advantage of this to promote international exchanges and collaborations. And in 1995, when the rapid growth of the Internet made open activities on a full-time and global scale viable, THE THING again expanded and intensified its efforts by initiating individual and collaborative efforts with an extraordinary variety of artists and emerging new media artists.

Over the last decade, THE THING has played a seminal role not just in fostering a generation of network-oriented artists, critics, and curators, but also - and equally important - searching out ways to interconnect their diverse interests and activities.

From sponsoring a prescient electronic edition by the noted artist Peter Halley in 1993, the ranks of artists who were among the earliest to explore the possibilities of electronic networks through THE THING includes Beat Streuli, Mariko Mori, Martin Kippenberger. THE THING also presented the work of emerging (and now well-known) new media artists such as John Simon, Heath Bunting, Sawad Brooks, Vuk Cosic, Mark Napier & Andy Deck, Ricardo Dominguez, Prema Murthy, John Klima, Diane Ludin, and Daniel Pflumm. Similarly, then-emerging and now notable curators such as Benjamin Weil and Jordan Crandall undertook many of their foundational projects and networking activities in conjunction with THE THING.

Perhaps the strongest testimony to THE THING's protean status and activities is the fact that it has spawned independent "THING"s in Berlin (1993), Vienna (1993), Frankfurt (1994), Amsterdam (1994) and Rome (1999). While the success of these projects has been mixed depending on local conditions, all are still in operation. That the name "THE THING" is regarded internationally as a rubric for a constellation of interests and ethics confirms that THE THING has played a vital role in fostering an open dialogue between the established artists and arts institutions, digital culture, new media arts, and emerging artists.

One of the projects presented by The Thing is Radio Polyphony,a sound piece created by Paulo Vivacqua (Brazil), Federico Marulanda Rey (Colombia), Peter Lasch (Mexico), and Kelvin Park (S.Korea), in collaboration with THING.FM.

The piece consists of four sound channels composed in such a way that they can be heard either independently or mixed. Each channel is delivered over a different radio frequency or internet stream (or both), sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not. The piece therefore shuns a unified listening experience, and it is not accessible to any audience as a whole. Nevertheless, events will be organized around those times and places in which it will be possible to hear some or all channels at once.

The four channels are:

1) Internet stream 1: Generative sound process in SuperCollider. This stream can be heard at: http://audio.thing.net:8000/icy_1

2) Internet stream 2/Mini FM transmitters: Looping pre-recorded composition. 2 CD players generate a mix of prepared sounds. As the CDs are of different length, the loops go on for several days without repetition. This stream will be up by the end of this week.

3) Radio broadcast 1: Computer composition in MetaSynth.

4) Radio broadcast 2: Pre-recorded composition.

The piece will be unfolding from Feb. 28 to April 18.

The project's website provides an ongoing overview of the piece, while serving as its final score. It lists the net addresses and the specific frequencies and ranges of broadcast sources playing the different channels during the development of the piece. It is accessible for the duration of the event at http://fm.thing.net/radiopolyphony.

The Trinity Session
Directors: Stephen Hobbs, Kathryn Smith, Marcus Neustetter
The Trinity Session is an independent contemporary art production team practising in public art projects, project initiation and production, curating, researching and critical writing. Specialized interest areas include urban development and criticism, technology, pathology and the body, electronic art and online culture.

The end of 2000 saw a radical change in how the local artworld was structured, with several galleries and institutions closing or restructuring in the face of a tight economic climate less favourable to contemporary arts and culture. As a result, we believe that the processes of absorbing, producing, communicating and representing art will shift in interesting ways that will often seem invisible in the so-called artworld landscape. We are interested in intercepting such interstices and making them tangible, working with a number of socially-focused visual art and research projects and curated exhibitions.

By acting as correspondents and consultants, and approaching the work process from a network and "accommodation and exchange of information" angle, the purpose of our working dynamic is to produce in a cross-platform, multidisciplinary way with artists, institutions and corporate brands and services. Our interests lie in closing some of the gaps between contemporary art, fashion and culture by interpreting and visualising trends and developments in collaboration with these like-minded partners.

Individually, Trinity members lecture at various institutions in Gauteng and have been commissioned to write for a number of publications including www.artthrob.co.za, Art South Africa magazine, the Taxi and Fresh series' (artists' monographs), Flash Art International, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Fine Art Forum and Contemporary.

Current developments include relaunching a project room/ gallery space, The | PREMISES, in Johannesburg and reconnecting sanman (Southern African New Media Art Network), a resource that promotes new media art and technology amongst audiences and artists in South Africa and networks companies, institutions and individuals that share similar interest in this field.
http://www.onair.co.za
ts@onair.co.za

Walker Art Center
Walker copresents New Ideas on Globalization with the University of Minnesota Humanities Institute, the Institute for Global Studies, and the European Studies Consortium.

Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State
Hou Hanru

omnipresent network, in a shifting in-between space that thrives on the hybridity and conflicts of cultures and identities.[2] But, this choice should be capable of carrying out efficient strategies of critique, resistance, and transgression against the hegemonic power of the Empire. Unfortunately, the mainstream "global art world," namely, the dominant art institutions, remain in the high-modernist tradition of the white cube and post-minimalist, post-conceptualist forms. This "transcendent" physicality constitutes a hegemonic ideology and practice paradigm. This centralized power controls the definition, the boundary, of contemporary art and propagates it across the world as if it were the "universal truth," the only legitimated way, of "global" art.

5. Against such a background, resistance to this hegemony becomes necessary and urgent, especially in places where new local identities are facing the pressure of globalizing powers. This resistance naturally generates and articulates new forms of action and organization fundamentally different from those of the establishment. In fact, a great number of initiatives already have been launched and promoted, and they strongly emphasize the philosophy of "Do-It-Yourself." Indeed, DIY communities and self-organizations are the main source of sustainability, the main force in the revival and continued development of today's post-planning cities. The creation and development of alternative art spaces is a perfect example. Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones shifts constantly between the existing center and the periphery, creating a kind of "emptiness" that subverts the established order.[3] This approach resonates with the current global economic system, which is moving toward a new perspective that focuses on productivity rather than the production of objects. Driven by the development of new technologies, conventional modes of production and consumption have been altered and substituted by new paradigms. In different locales around the world, new autonomous zones of economic activities are being established that resist and at the same time contribute to the globalization of dominant modes of production. These zones become an oppositional yet actively participatory force against the domination of state and global economic superpowers. Self-organizations such as international NGOs are now counterparts to the established bureaucratic order, in which transnational and global corporations push for the disintegration of national and continental borders and for the dissolution of state sovereignty. Under the imperial mantle of the new global economic-political power structure, the immediate challenge is how to preserve freedom of speech, encourage critique, and promote different modes of living and thinking. This economic and political transformation has a direct cultural consequence: it reveals the necessity of searching for and creating alternatives to the established cultural institution. To promote cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary art, one must first and foremost consider the need to create alternative contexts, namely institutions, for art activity.

6. Asia-Pacific provides a dynamic example of this transition in terms of integrating itself in the globalization process and reinventing different modernities. The unprecedented speed of modernization and democratization of society in this region has led to self-discovery and to a search for autonomous modes of living, thinking, and expression that stand in contrast to conservative and hegemonic political systems and social values. There are enthusiastic and fervent demands to put contemporary art from this region on the global map. This is achieved through two intimately linked directives: the creation of new infrastructures and conditions inside the region for the activities, and the exportation of these activities outside the region, especially in renowned "international arenas" such as major biennials and museums. This encourages the artists living in the region to develop new strategies, the most significant tendency being the creation and propagation of

2 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

3 See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, anti-copyright 1985, 1991); also available online at . According to Bey, TAZ is "a certain kind of 'free enclave'" resisting against the mainstream, state power structure. It is "an essay ('attempt'), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy" that encourages "uprising," or "insurrection," against the state power. It's situated beyond all manner of established forms of organization: "The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it." It is invisible, always shifting, "a microcosm of that 'anarchist dream' of a free culture." "The TAZ is an encampment of guerrilla ontologists: strike and run away." It has a "temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. But clearly it must also have 'location' in the Web.…" In the end, "The TAZ is somewhere. It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals." It can bring about ultimate liberation "on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings."

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

new practices. Nevertheless, as important and reassuring as the notion of thirdness and in-betweenness is, it might only be the third step on the way to change. It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of thirdness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not, thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge rather than one that empowers it.[28]

For Atelier Bow-Wow and Can Altay, the starting point for their respective projects involves inventory and documentation. This impetus to record one's own environment is apparent in many artistic practices today, most obviously in the practice of film, but not exclusively. The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade, as demonstrated by the incorporation of moving images into art practices, using models borrowed from popular culture and entertainment, including Hollywood movies, music videos, and video games.

The exigency of information and realism reveals itself in Chinese artist Wang Jian Wei's film Living Elsewhere (1999-2000; pp. 245-247). The film, which documents a failed real-estate development project in the suburbs of Beijing, seems motivated by the need to record a socioeconomical and cultural mutation. The same drive applies to Zhao Liang's film Bored Youth (2000; pp. 253-255), which focuses on Beijing's predatory urban development, even though the pure documentary language is mixed with editing strategies inherited from music videos. In both cases, documentary filmmaking becomes a means for sustaining a tradition that has almost disappeared from art practice: the tradition of storytelling.

Although she does not use moving images as a medium, Yin Xiuzhen participates in this strategy when she documents--through installations or interventions--the way in which memory vanishes with the destruction or dislocation of communities (pp. 249-251). Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack. The powerful body of work that has erupted under this logic of documentary has also allowed the practitioners to reassert their own proximity and to locate their practices, and the consequences thereof, on a very local or regional level. Again, this movement can be seen as an effect of a widely globalized culture. Here, the urgency is to find a way to make a difference. The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The paradox of the increasingly globalized world is that many artists are attempting to reinvent, or to establish, their difference. This movement, which might be the unavoidable flip side of globalization, was the cornerstone of the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.[29] One outstanding feature of this exhibition was the presence of twenty-six collectives or independent organizations from Europe and Asia. These groups have emerged over the last decade as fundamental protagonists in art-making and diffusion, developing alternative strategies that affect the relationship of art to the larger world. These groups/platforms, all active in their communities as exhibition venues, educational structures, or production units, serve as a metaphor for a new arena of negotiation that lies in between the global and the local.[30]

In many ways, the projects of Kaoru Arima, developed through his Art Drug Center in Inuyama-City, Japan, echo such concerns. In his own house, Arima opened an art center to provide a platform for fellow artists who might not otherwise find venues for showing their work. With a similar attention to the value of proximity, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, composed of filmmakers and new-media practitioners, is working on a series of initiatives motivated by the desire to interpret, understand, and engage the urban construct of the city in which they live and work. One of their projects is based on the creation of a "cyber neighborhood," acenter for digital intervention with kids in a working-class settlement in New Delhi.

28 On this topic see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Unpacking Europe, eds. Hassan and Dadi, p. 245.

29 The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, titled Pause, was co-curated by Charles Esche, director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden,and Hou Hanru, freelance curator, director of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and member of the Walker Art Center's global advisory committee.

30 For more on this topic, see Hou Hanru's essay on page 36 in this book.

Just How Did Latitudes Become Forms?
Aimee Chang, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, Philippe Vergne

galleries. The multidisciplinary agenda that we have is reflected in the practice of some of the artists, but not systematically.

Something very interesting and new about the way we're working is how this coming together of departments at the Walker is formalized in the publication. It might be one of the first times that everything--the exhibition, the film program, the performing art program, and the educational curriculum--has a voice in the catalogue.

This crossover is embedded in my own researches. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed[11] and Oiticica's philosophies were equally important touchstones for me as a curator of the exhibition. They are both helping me to reconsider the word "popular."

OI: Working across departments is something that we have been moving toward through exhibitions such as Art Performs Life, Let's Entertain, and American Tableaux. An important part of the institution's vision has to do with making connections cross-departmentally so that our audiences for film, for example, are not completely separate from our audiences for visual arts. If we make those connections inside the building then people outside the building can also make those connections. It was exciting, sometimes confusing, but mostly informative and thought-provoking to be at the table with all of the other departments and with our advisory committee and to make links--conceptually, thematically, and art historically--in the work we all do. The underlying goal of this initiative is about making fundamental changes that will help us formulate more expansive ideas and programming in the future.

PV: To wrap things up I'd like to read this statement by Raymond Williams, which I find helpful in understanding the goal of such an institutional initiative:

The innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we have to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition that may address itself not to this by now exploitable because inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.[12]

This question of communities is central to our efforts. What communities are we talking about and to? How do we address them and why? How are they affected by and how are they affecting art practices, institutional practices? The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.

11 Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1983).

12 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), p. 35; quoted in Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), p. 297.

Translocal Programmers

To promote cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary art, one must first and foremost consider the need to create alternative contexts, namely institutions, for art activity.

The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.